10 Philosophy Books 4 Your Perusal (Pt 9): Ion

“Socrates Is an Ass!”

As Represented by Plato (ARP) in Ion

Yeah. We are going old school this time. Very old school. While most people choose things like The Republic, or Artistotle's Ethics when talking about the ancient Greeks, I chose Ion. Why? Because its funny, rude, obnoxious, and delightful. 

This little dialogue seems a simple conversation between Socrates (ARP) the philosopher and Ion the rhapsodic performer. As usual, Socrates (ARP) uses lots of sarcasm and irony in this dialogue, which he quickly expresses. Although this may seem a rather insipid conversation, to the initiated it is chock full of interesting little tidbits.

What’s the General Gist?

Ion suggests not only is he a good reciter of poetry but is also an exegete who can interpret and explain what a poem is about. The central question in the Ion is one of privilege and qualification. Who is qualified to be an interpreter of the privileged language of the past? Who can correctly interpret Homer or any of the other poets? For example, when the performer recites Homer’s description of being a general, how is it that Ion can know what it is to be a good or bad general. Can he judge good “doctoring?”

Ion is denied this role, because he relies on inspiration, rather than knowledge (episteme) and practical skill (tekhne). If one possesses a particular skill, one can judge and critique it, because, one understands and can explain all aspects of that skill, including good and/or bad manifestation of it. Doctors can critique doctors. Generals can critique generals. Socrates (ARP) says that Ion cannot even judge poetry, for he has no poetic skill himself.

Dear God,

Go Get an Exorcist

Socrates (ARP) proposes that since Ion’s rhapsodic performances are not based on knowledge or skill, then he must be possessed or inspired. Then Socrates (ARP) goes off on the magnetic ring example. Despite its silliness, the magnetic ring example helps sharpen how audiences are affected by poetry/performance. As the last link on this chain of inspiration, we are capable of being deeply affected by poetry. We “spectators” at the recital also lose our minds, to some degree, weeping or laughing as we enter into the narrated scene, seemingly forgetting our real selves and lives. Socrates (ARP) has a divide in mind between reason and inspiration. This philosopher v. artist fight has been going on ever since.

Oh, yes!

“Let’s Get Ready to Rumble!!!”

“Go to Your Respective Corners…and Come Out Swinging"

Reason

Nous - sound mind/faculty of reason

Phren - wit

Episteme - knowledge

Tekne - skill (including communicative)

Inspiration

Ho nous meketi en autoi - out of one's mind

Ekphron - witless

Entheos - possessed/inspired

Theia dunamis - divine power

Associated with reason are philosophers, doctors, generals, painters, and those who can show critical communicative abilities of explanation, examination and judgment. Associated with inspiration are poets, rhapsodes, and anyone else who cannot give an account of how they do what they do. Reason, skill, intellect and understanding are pitted against “unreflective,” inspired activity. These are mutually exclusive territories.

“Making Your Republic Safe”

Erase the Word

Persecute the Performers

Banish the Poets

A couple of interesting connections for fodder:

As laid out in Phaedrus,

Socrates (ARP) regards the written word as inferior to the spoken 
– so why is he so anti-performer?

Poets are banished from The Republic.

In Protagoras poets are considered the original sophists.
In Phaedrus poets are “sacred, but mad.”
Remember, Socrates (ARP) likely wanted some “divine” Ionic nookie too.

He was always on a booty call.

Your Bank Hates You: From Banks to Credit Unions

My First Experience with a Big Bank

What’s going on with the big banks today reminds me of what happened in the early 1990s. When I went to work for Leadership Directories, Inc. (Back then it was called Monitor Publishing, but eventually changed its name because Monitor is the name of the paper the Christian Scientists publish – which we had nothing to do with)… oh that was a heck of a digression.

Anywho, when I went to work in NYC in 1991, I opened an account at Manufacturer’s Hanover. “Manny Hanny” was a pretty big bank, but it was regional to New York City. Plus, being based in NYC as it was, I could get money out of a MAC anywhere in the city. 

For those who don’t know MAC stands for “Money Access Center,” the old northeast version of ATM. By the way, never call an ATM an “ATM Machine.” ATM stands for Automated Teller Machine, so if you say ATM Machine you are really saying Automated Teller Machine Machine. And that’s idiodic. Like saying PDF File. PDF stands for Portable Document File, so really you are saying Portable Document File File. You are using an RAS. Please stop. Try not to sound like a mentally-challenged platypus. But again, I digress…

So I could get money once I got to the city via the PATH train, or on the way home via a MAC machine. (“MAC machine” is, by the way, allowable since there is no redundancy.) Checking was free as long as there was a direct deposit from my place of work. Not a problem at all and I had that Manny Hanny account for about a year. I actually used to walk through this door to do my banking.

The Manny Hanny Golden Door on 34th St.

Then they merged with Chemical bank. Chemical was having trouble with bad real estate loans (sound familiar?) and Manny Hanny was having problems with international loans (Argentina and Mexico, in particular), so they decided to join forces. At the time it was the largest bank merger in American History.

At first it was no big deal. Until Chemical – as the new bank was called – decided to close 70 locations. That put a damper on where I could get money, when I could get money, and how I could get money. No big deal, just a little bit more planning and walking and waiting in lines. Until…

Chemical decided that they did not want to deal with piss ants like myself. They decided to up the amount you had to have in your account to about $1,500 or they were going to start charging. People who were living paycheck to paycheck, people just starting out, or just starting over, or just making ends meet…people like my friends and I, didn’t have that money just laying in a bank. And they wanted rid of us. We were a PITA to them. They didn’t make any money off our piddly little checking account balances. We cost them money, so they put up barriers that basically forced us all to move. I went to Pamrapo Savings & Loan in Hoboken. Right across from the PATH, so again easy to get money going in or out of the city. My friends also changed banks. 

My 2nd Experience with a Big Bank

Eventually, however, I found my way back to a big bank. The big bank: Bank of America. I was fairly happy with them. Until... first they wanted to charge me $40 just to have one of their credit cards. Say what? A $40 fee on a $2K card. Please. Then they started to take away the free checking. That was that. Buh-bye.

Does this sound familiar? It should.  Bank of America is jacking up debit card rates and Citi is changing all sorts of requirements for depositors. Its not just the nationals. Regions, First Tennessee, and Suntrust all jerking around their customers with fees. It appears that the banks have decided that we aren’t worth it. They don’t want to deal with the “loser” working class anymore. Fine. Or they want us to move to credit cards so they can make even more money off of us. Fine. Piss on them.

Take your money out. Find a credit union. You can start here. And here. And here too. Forget the big banks. We bailed them out. They took our money. Now they are using the money that we saved them with to charge us to use our own money. Eastman Credit Union is my new financial institution.


And the colonists thought King George was a nonrepresentative taxer! If Thomas Paine and Sam Adams, etc. could see what was going on now, they’d be right in the thick of #occupywallstreet, in their white powdered wigs, getting ready to burn down some buildings and start another revolution!

What ever happened to my old Manny Hanny? Chemical....


was bought by Chase...

...which merged with JPMorgan...

...and is now JPMorganChase. 

JPMorganChase is one of the biggest banks in the world, like BoA, Wells Fargo, and Citi. We bailed them all out. They are all  charging people to use their own money. Leave them. They don't love you. In fact, they are abusive, not only to you as a customer, but to our country as well. Leave them. GTFO.

10 Philosophy Books 4 Your Perusal (Pt 8): The Care of the Self

Michelle Foucault

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self 

Ethics. Identity. Selfhood. Self-Discipline. Discourse. That’s how you could sum up the latter part of Foucault’s project, if of course you could sum up Foucault's opus. However, like any good philosopher's works, you just can't sum it up. It is always being put to new and different uses. (Which reminds me of the old quote: "The history of philosophy is just one long footnote to Plato.")

Plus, reading Foucault can sometimes make your head do this.

Anyway, once interested in the genealogy of society, madness, and order, Foucault moved on to the development of the subject, a.k.a. the person, a.k.a. the human individual. It is in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self that Foucault seriously delves into how discourses make us and how we use discourses to make our “selves.” 

Foucault contended that technologies of the self must be comprehended as inextricably connected to his notion of governmentality: the guiding rationales individuals and social structures use to regulate and police norms of thought and behavior. Foucault endeavored to show how the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual co-determine each other’s emergence.

While Foucault was particularly interested in sexuality and the discourses surrounding sexuality and sexual identity his work has been influential in psychology, theology, gender studies, organizational communication. We will talk about some of those later. First, however, some of Michel.

“As a context, we must understand that there are four major types of these "technologies," each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform I themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” (1988)

Foucault’s opus indicates the importance of, and interrelationships between, identity, power and knowledge. For Foucault power does not reside is a particular person or institution, but is engendered instead in discourses, practices, and procedures of everyday life and becomes apparent when it is exercised. Power is everywhere in social relations, and is exercised at all levels of an organization and society through various discourses and processes. Human beings are made subjects – or socially constructed – through various disciplinary discourses. The control of the self is a form of control through the discourses of power/knowledge.

As Foucault (1993) noted, in order to study power and the individual one must examine governmentality, the contact points of the “techniques of domination and techniques of the self” (p. 203). Governing people…is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself (p. 203-204). Discipline therefore is not simply imposed from the outside, nor is it always complete, otherwise there would be no place for reflexivity. For Foucault, governmentality is not negative, but productive. It socially constructs subjects, reality, objects and rituals of truth.

While subjects are constructed through discursive processes, they are never powerless, but are active participants in creating the identities they desire by relying on various discourses. They can rebel and resist. (Remember Camus?) Individuals have the ability through these technologies of the self to reflect upon, shape, govern, and be responsible for their selves within these discourses and resources of power, to transfigure themselves to achieve a condition “of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality."

I am an organizational communication scholar and I've been heartily influenced by Foucault. Given the dynamic complexity of interrelated power relations, organizational scholars turned to the concept of struggle, an ongoing, interactive, unpredictable, definition-creating activity that moves beyond the static power/resistance model of domination. Similarly, because power resides in networks of relationships, subjects freely call upon differing discourses in order to enact strategic games, and therefore, play games of identity. In organizations these issues of identity transcend personal, organizational and occupational lines. 

Here are some of my favorite Foucault works and those who have made use of Foucault: 

Ashcraft, K. L., & Mumby, D. K. (2004). Reworking gender: A feminist communicology of organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

Deacon, R. A. (2003). Fabricating Foucault: Rationalizing the management of individuals. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.

Martin, L. H., Gutman, H., & Hutton, P. H. (Eds.) (1988). Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock.

Herrmann, A. F. (2008). Narratives and sensemaking in the new corporate university: the socialization of first year communication faculty. Unpublished dissertation, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.

    

Michel Foucault's "History of Madness" in English, is the complete version of the English translation called "Madness and Civilization", which since it was abridged, produced some serious misinterpretations. Foucault shows how the idea of "madness" from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the present, has undergone several transformations of meaning.  It is excellent...

....and it might make your head do this.